“In the movies, the cops always suspect those closest to the victim, don’t they? Well, Rob and Eleanor had an on-off thing going on. And him splitting town like that didn’t help him none either.”

Jessica nodded. “The newspaper said this guy vanished around the same time Eleanor was murdered.”

Freeman looked her right in the eye. “Not around the same time,” he said. “The very same night.”

She sat up straighter. “The same night?”

“Uh-huh. He did a late shift at the bar as usual. Left around midnight, said he was going to Eleanor’s place on Morrison. That was the last time I ever saw him. The next day they found Eleanor’s body, and the little girl was gone.”

12 PRYCE

12

PRYCE

Tommy Getz, the manager of the Dreamz Motel, had been right about the man Amy Ong spent her last night with.

He was old and fat.

At fifty-six, Frank Sherman was almost three times the age of the college student. He tipped the scales at more than two hundred pounds, none of which was muscle. He had thinning gray hair, a red doughy face, and tiny beady eyes that peered warily back and forth between Pryce and Medina in Interview Room II.

They had picked him up at his place of work, a large auto insurance agency on Wilshire, where he had been employed for almost thirty years. Sherman held a senior enough position within the company to have his own small glass-fronted office overlooking an open-plan space filled with two dozen customer service advisors. His initial refusal to accompany the detectives to Hollywood to answer some questions about his relationship with Amy Ong was quickly replaced by reluctant acquiescence when offered the alternative of walking past rows of coworkers wearing handcuffs.

Once at the station, he was put in an interview room with no windows or AC and had been left there on his own for almost an hour.

“Make the bastard sweat,” Medina had said.

It worked.

Sherman’s face was slick with perspiration, and the collar of his smart white shirt was damp by the time Pryce and Medina sat down across from him. Medina told Sherman he was not under arrest but advised him their conversation was being recorded by the small camera fixed to the ceiling in the corner of the room.

“Do I need to call my lawyer?” Sherman asked.

“I don’t know, Mr. Sherman,” Pryce said. “Do you?”

“I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“Good. In that case, we’ll all be out of here in no time. We just want to go over a few things that might assist us with our investigation. Let’s get started, shall we?”

Sherman hesitated, then nodded. “Okay.”

“Detective Medina?” Pryce said.